Scholars@Duke
Sonia Silvestri

Sonia Silvestri

Adjunct Associate Professor in the Earth and Climate Sciences Division
Earth and Climate Sciences

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Short-term recovery of inland and marine environments after the 2023 Emilia-Romagna flood

Journal article Communications Earth and Environment · December 1, 2026 Extreme floods can strongly affect connected inland and marine environments, yet their short-term recovery remains poorly resolved. Here we use an integrated multidisciplinary approach to assess the short- and medium-term effects of the 2023 Emilia-Romagna ... Full text Cite

Spatio-temporal variability of landslides as indicator of climate change impact: Towards an Italian national scale integrated procedure for the rainfall role analysis in landslide dynamics

Journal article International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · September 1, 2026 Ground instabilities such as landslides, subsidence, sinkholes, and soil liquefaction are highly sensitive to climate change. In Italy, these phenomena represent a major component of hydrogeological risk, particularly in mountainous and hilly regions where ... Full text Cite

AI-Assisted Physical Modeling of Sun Glint to Improve Inter-Sensor Consistency of Remote Sensing Reflectance in Coastal Waters

Journal article The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences · July 30, 2026 Abstract. The remote sensing of biophysical parameters in aquatic systems, such as water constituents, depends strongly on the quality of the spectral data. Sun glint, specular reflection from the water surface, is a major artifact that can substan ... Full text Cite

Sea Lavender Reimagined: Keystone Halophytes in Salt Marsh Blue Carbon Dynamics

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · January 1, 2026 Salt marshes are ecologically and socio-economically valuable intertidal ecosystems that have suffered rapid losses worldwide. As a blue carbon ecosystem (BCE), they are efficient sinks and long-term reservoirs of organic carbon (OC), with vital roles in t ... Full text Cite

Spectral Unmixing of Coastal Dune Plant Species from Very High Resolution Satellite Imagery

Journal article Remote Sensing · December 1, 2025 Highlights: What are the main findings? Spectral unmixing with random forest regressor showed good skill in terms of detecting the fractional cover of major dune plant species but performed poorly for small-stemmed or less abundant species. Model accuracy ... Full text Cite

Remote Sensing of Alpine Peatlands: Challenges of Mapping Thousands of Sparse Small Sites Scattered Across Extensive Mountainous Territories

Journal article Earth and Space Science · July 1, 2025 Alpine peatlands are one of the carbon reservoirs, provide vital ecosystem services, and support endangered biodiversity. However, they are globally understudied, including those in the Italian Alps, which host thousands of small sites averaging under 1 ha ... Full text Cite

Recovery from drought-induced dieback may lead to modified salt marsh vegetation composition

Journal article Limnology and Oceanography · March 1, 2025 Salt marshes are vital but vulnerable ecosystems. However, our understanding of disturbance-induced dieback and recovery processes in multi-specific marshes remains limited. This study utilized remote sensing data (2001–2021) to analyze a dieback event and ... Full text Cite

Unmixing marsh vegetation species across multiple sensors and spatial scales

Journal article Giscience and Remote Sensing · January 1, 2025 Coastal marsh ecosystems are critical for providing essential habitats, buffering coastlines against erosion, and sequestering carbon. However, there is a global trend where these ecosystems are disappearing due to rising sea levels, wave-drive erosion, an ... Full text Cite

UAV Photogrammetry-Based Leaf Area Index for Above-Ground Biomass Estimation in Wetlands

Journal article IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · January 1, 2025 Wetlands are highly productive and biologically diverse environments that provide numerous ecosystem services. Effective monitoring methods are critical to ensure their preservation and management. This article used UAV-derived RGB images and structure fro ... Full text Cite

Detection and mitigation of soil salinization risk from saline/brackish water aquaculture in coastal areas: an application of remote sensing and managed aquifer recharge

Journal article Journal of Coastal Conservation · October 1, 2024 This study focuses on detecting and mitigating soil salinization in four coastal areas of the Mekong Delta (Vietnam). Salinity patterns in the soils of the Mekong River Delta are not random but linked to land use practices and distance to the sea. We exami ... Full text Cite

Probabilistic Petrophysical Reconstruction of Danta's Alpine Peatland via Electromagnetic Induction Data

Journal article Earth and Space Science · March 1, 2024 Peatlands are fundamental deposits of organic carbon. Thus, their protection is of crucial importance to avoid emissions from their degradation. Peat is a mixture of organic soil that originates from the accumulation of wetland plants under continuous or c ... Full text Cite

Driving and limiting factors of CH4 and CO2 emissions from coastal brackish-water wetlands in temperate regions

Journal article Biogeosciences · January 3, 2024 Coastal wetlands play a fundamental role in mitigating climate change thanks to their ability to store large amounts of organic carbon in the soil. However, degraded freshwater wetlands are also known to be the first natural emitter of methane (CH4). Salin ... Full text Cite

Dune belt restoration effectiveness assessed by UAV topographic surveys (northern Adriatic coast, Italy)

Journal article Biogeosciences · December 7, 2023 Unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) monitoring surveys are used to assess a dune restoration project in the protected natural area of the Bevano River mouth on the northern Adriatic coast (Ravenna, Italy). The impacts of the installed fences to aid dune develo ... Full text Cite

Toward coherent space-time mapping of seagrass cover from satellite data: An example of a Mediterranean lagoon

Journal article Biogeosciences · November 20, 2023 Seagrass meadows are a highly productive and economically important shallow coastal habitat. Their sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, combined with their importance for local biodiversity, carbon stocks, and sediment dynamics, motivate ... Full text Cite

Long-Term Monitoring of Coupled Vegetation and Elevation Changes in Response to Sea Level Rise in a Microtidal Salt Marsh

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · June 1, 2023 Tight interplays between physical and biotic processes in tidal salt marshes lead to self-organization of halophytic vegetation into recurrent zonation patterns developed across elevation gradients. Despite its importance for marsh ecomorphodynamics, howev ... Full text Cite

Integrals of life: Tracking ecosystem spatial heterogeneity from space through the area under the curve of the parametric Rao's Q index

Journal article Ecological Complexity · February 1, 2023 Spatio-ecological heterogeneity is strongly linked to many ecological processes and functions such as plant species diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, and gene flow. Remote sensing is particularly useful for measuring spatial heterogen ... Full text Cite

Leaf area index and aboveground biomass estimation of an alpine peatland with a UAV multi-sensor approach

Journal article Giscience and Remote Sensing · January 1, 2023 Aboveground biomass (AGB) can serve as an indicator when estimating various biogeochemical processes in peatlands, an ecosystem which provides countless ecosystem services and plays a key role in climate regulation. While remote sensing has been extensivel ... Full text Cite

Comment on “Soil salinity assessment by using near-infrared channel and Vegetation Soil Salinity Index derived from Landsat 8 OLI data: a case study in the Tra Vinh Province, Mekong Delta, Vietnam” by Kim-Anh Nguyen, Yuei-An Liou, Ha-Phuong Tran, Phi-Phung Hoang and Thanh-Hung Nguyen

Journal article Progress in Earth and Planetary Science · December 1, 2022 Nguyen et al. (Prog Earth Planet Sci 7:1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40645-019-0311-0) suggest that Landsat 8 OLI can be used to map and monitor soil salinity in the coastal zone of the Mekong River Delta. The authors use empirical correlations between ... Full text Cite

Exploring open-source multispectral satellite remote sensing as a tool to map long-term evolution of salt marsh shorelines

Journal article Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science · March 5, 2022 From an ecological and socio-economic perspective, salt marshes are one of the most valuable natural assets on Earth. As external pressures are causing their extensive degradation and loss globally, the ability to monitor salt marshes on a long-term scale ... Full text Cite

Tides, Topography, and Seagrass Cover Controls on the Spatial Distribution of Pinna nobilis on a Coastal Lagoon Tidal Flat

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · March 1, 2022 In the last two decades Pinna nobilis, the largest bivalve mollusk endemic to the Mediterranean Sea, has recolonized the tidal flats of some coastal lagoons along the Italian Adriatic coast. In this study, we investigate the influence of tides on the spati ... Full text Cite

rasterdiv-An Information Theory tailored R package for measuring ecosystem heterogeneity from space: To the origin and back.

Journal article Methods in ecology and evolution · June 2021 Ecosystem heterogeneity has been widely recognized as a key ecological indicator of several ecological functions, diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, population connectivity or gene flow.In this paper, we present a new R package-rasterd ... Full text Cite

Morphodynamic and sedimentary processes in salt-marshes and tidal channels of the Venice Lagoon (Italy)

Journal article Geological Field Trips and Maps · January 1, 2021 Tidal landscapes are currently threatened by climate change and increasing human interferences, and are possibly subject to irreversible transformations with far-reaching social, economical, and ecological implications worldwide. The Venice Lagoon formed o ... Full text Cite

Resolving the thickness of peat deposits with contact-less electromagnetic methods: A case study in the Venice coastland.

Journal article The Science of the total environment · October 2020 Peat soils are typical deposits characterizing wetlands and reclaimed farmlands. They are important carbon reservoirs and when degraded (e.g., erosive processes, fires, draining and plowing) massive carbon dioxide volumes are released. This leads to increa ... Full text Cite

Assessing the fractional abundance of highly mixed salt-marsh vegetation using random forest soft classification

Journal article Remote Sensing · October 1, 2020 Coastal salt marshes are valuable and critical components of tidal landscapes, currently threatened by increasing rates of sea level rise, wave-induced lateral erosion, decreasing sediment supply, and human pressure. Halophytic vegetation plays an importan ... Full text Cite

Remote sensing for optimal estimation of water temperature dynamics in shallow tidal environments

Journal article Remote Sensing · January 1, 2020 Given the increasing anthropogenic pressures on lagoons, estuaries, and lakes and considering the highly dynamic behavior of these systems, methods for the continuous and spatially distributed retrieval of water quality are becoming vital for their correct ... Full text Open Access Cite

Quantification of Peat Thickness and Stored Carbon at the Landscape Scale in Tropical Peatlands: A Comparison of Airborne Geophysics and an Empirical Topographic Method

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface · December 1, 2019 Featured Publication Peatlands play a key role in the global carbon cycle, sequestering and releasing large amounts of carbon. Despite their importance, a reliable method for the quantification of peatland thickness and volume is still missing, particularly for peat deposits l ... Full text Open Access Cite

Peatland Volume Mapping Over Resistive Substrates With Airborne Electromagnetic Technology

Journal article Geophysical Research Letters · June 28, 2019 Despite the importance of peatlands as carbon reservoirs, a reliable methodology for the detection of peat volumes at regional scale is still missing. In this study we explore for the first time the use of airborne electromagnetic (AEM) to detect and quant ... Full text Cite

The Spatial Variability of Organic Matter and Decomposition Processes at the Marsh Scale

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · December 1, 2018 Accretion rate in salt marshes is governed by inorganic soil deposition and soil organic matter (SOM) accumulation. Existing (limited) observations and modeling results suggest that SOM amounts, biomass production, and decomposition processes should vary w ... Full text Cite

Assessing rehabilitation of managed mangrove ecosystems using high resolution remote sensing

Journal article Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science · October 31, 2018 Mangroves are valuable ecosystems for coastal protection, carbon sequestration and storage, and they provide habitat, refuge and rearing areas for many important marine species. To control mosquito outbreaks in coastal regions, mangroves were often impound ... Full text Cite

Anthropogenic Modifications Can Significantly Influence the Local Mean Sea Level and Affect the Survival of Salt Marshes in Shallow Tidal Systems

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface · May 1, 2018 In a shallow dissipative tidal system, interventions that modify the local morphology in one location of the basin may quickly affect the surrounding areas, promoting strong changes in their morphology. If the localized modification persists over time, it ... Full text Cite

Water and sediment temperature dynamics in shallow tidal environments: The role of the heat flux at the sediment-water interface

Journal article Advances in Water Resources · March 1, 2018 In the present study, we investigate the energy flux at the sediment-water interface and the relevance of the heat exchanged between water and sediment for the water temperature dynamics in shallow coastal environments. Water and sediment temperature data ... Full text Cite

Hyperspectral and multispectral retrieval of suspended sediment in shallow coastal waters using semi-analytical and empirical methods

Journal article Remote Sensing · April 21, 2017 Natural lagoons and estuaries worldwide are experiencing accelerated ecosystem degradation due to increased anthropogenic pressure. As a key driver of coastal zone dynamics, suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is difficult to monitor with adequate spati ... Full text Cite

Coupled topographic and vegetation patterns in coastal dunes: Remote sensing observations and ecomorphodynamic implications

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · January 1, 2017 Vegetation plays a key role in stabilizing coastal dunes and barrier islands by mediating sand transport, deposition, and erosion. Dune topography, in turn, affects vegetation growth, by determining local environmental conditions. However, our understandin ... Full text Cite

The predictability of mosquito abundance from daily to monthly timescales.

Journal article Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · December 2016 The prediction of mosquito abundance is of central interest in addressing mosquito population dynamics and in forecasting the associated emerging and re-emerging diseases. However, little work has focused on the systematic evaluation of how well adult mosq ... Full text Cite

Spatial variation of salt-marsh organic and inorganic deposition and organic carbon accumulation: Inferences from the Venice lagoon, Italy

Journal article Advances in Water Resources · July 1, 2016 Salt marshes are ubiquitous features of the tidal landscape governed by mutual feedbacks among processes of physical and biological nature. Improving our understanding of these feedbacks and of their effects on tidal geomorphological and ecological dynamic ... Full text Cite

Multiple stable states and catastrophic shifts in coastal wetlands: Progress, challenges, and opportunities in validating theory using remote sensing and other methods

Journal article Remote Sensing · January 1, 2015 Multiple stable states are established in coastal tidal wetlands (marshes, mangroves, deltas, seagrasses) by ecological, hydrological, and geomorphological feedbacks. Catastrophic shifts between states can be induced by gradual environmental change or by d ... Full text Cite

Sediment dynamics in shallow tidal basins: In situ observations, satellite retrievals, and numerical modeling in the Venice Lagoon

Journal article Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface · April 1, 2014 The morphological evolution of shallow tidal systems strongly depends on gradients in transport that control sediment erosion and deposition. A spatially refined quantitative description of suspended sediment patterns and dynamics is therefore a key requir ... Full text Cite

Environmental forcing and density-dependent controls of Culex pipiens abundance in a temperate climate (Northeastern Italy)

Journal article Ecological Modelling · January 24, 2014 New and old mosquito-borne diseases have emerged and re-emerged in temperate regions over the recent past, but a mechanistic understanding of mosquito population dynamics, a fundamental step toward disease control, remains elusive. We propose here a Gomper ... Full text Cite

The temporal spectrum of adult mosquito population fluctuations: conceptual and modeling implications.

Journal article PloS one · January 2014 An improved understanding of mosquito population dynamics under natural environmental forcing requires adequate field observations spanning the full range of temporal scales over which mosquito abundance fluctuates in natural conditions. Here we analyze a ... Full text Open Access Cite

Remote sensing retrieval of suspended sediment concentration in shallow waters

Journal article Remote Sensing of Environment · January 17, 2011 The dynamics of coastal lagoons and estuarine areas is characterized by a delicate balance between biological and physical processes and the comprehension and monitoring of such processes require observations over a wide range of temporal and spatial scale ... Full text Cite

GIS, multi-criteria and multi-factor spatial analysis for the probability assessment of the existence of illegal landfills

Journal article International Journal of Geographical Information Science · October 1, 2009 This work deals with the identification of potentially contaminated areas using remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-criteria spatial analysis. The identification of unknown illegal landfills is a crucial environmental problem in ... Full text Cite

Remote sensing of salt-marsh ecogeomorphology

Journal article European Space Agency Special Publication ESA SP · November 1, 2006 This contribution evaluates the accuracy of salt-marsh vegetation classifications obtained from remote sensing observations with specific application to the Lagoon of Venice (Italy). Observation and classification schemes are evaluated on the basis of seve ... Cite

Spatial organization and ecohydrological interactions in oxygen-limited vegetation ecosystems

Journal article Water Resources Research · June 1, 2006 Wetlands are characterized by extremely high biodiversity and primary productivity (comparable to tropical rain forests), provide critical habitats for rare and endangered vegetation and animal species, and mediate the effects of floods and the action of t ... Full text Cite

Non-neutral vegetation dynamics

Journal article PLoS ONE · 2006 Open Access Cite

Mapping salt-marsh vegetation by multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing

Journal article Remote Sensing of Environment · 2006 Cite

Tidal regime, salinity and salt-marsh plant zonation

Journal article Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science · 2005 Cite

Tidal regime, salinity and salt marsh plant zonation

Journal article Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science · January 1, 2005 Salt marsh morphology is known to be strongly correlated to vegetation patterns through a complex interplay of biological and physical processes. This paper presents the results of field surveys at several study salt marshes within the Venice Lagoon (Italy ... Full text Cite

Subsurface flow and vegetation patterns in tidal environments

Journal article Water Resources Research · 2004 Cite

Hyperspectral remote sensing of salt marsh vegetation and morphology

Journal article Physics and Chemistry of the Earth · 2004 Cite

Patterns in tidal environments: Salt-marsh channel networks and vegetation

Journal article International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS · November 24, 2003 Salt marshes in tidal environments are characterised by complex patterns both in their geomorphic and ecological features. Such patterns arise through the elaboration of a network structure driven by the tidal forcing and through the interaction between hy ... Cite

Salt Marsh Vegetation Radiometry: Data Analysis and Scaling

Journal article Remote Sensing of Environment · 2002 Cite